NDF leader cries foul over treatment from military

From ABS-CBN (May 18): NDF leader cries foul over treatment from military

A consultant of the National Democratic Front (NDF) decried the treatment he got from the military during and after his arrest.

According to Roy Erecre, whom the Armed Forces tagged as a senior leader of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), he was denied counsel “as they interrogated and threatened and manhandled me.”

“I didn't know then that having medical treatment with one's family physician translates to ‘island-resort hopping’ of sorts in military mind, and that either constitutes a crime. I and my aide were just surprised that morning of May 7, 2014, when intelligence operatives pounced on us while on our way for my follow-up checkup for diabetes,” he said.

During his arrest, he claimed he was also robbed of his personal belongings. “Until now, my phone, journal, and flash drives haven't been returned,” he said.

He continued that the harassment continued immediately after his abduction.

“This government has kept me incommunicado by transferring me from one detention cell to another across the seas until finally jailing me in Bohol where I once studied and then learned the necessity and worked for the realization of a systemic revolution,” he said.

Davao City agents arrested Erecre and a companion last May 7 supposedly by virtue of a warrant of arrest from the Cebu and Bohol courts for alleged atrocities against civilians and government forces in the late 1990s until the early 2000s.

Ericre believes he experienced manhandling from military authorities for being a consultant to the peace panel.

“It is a role I have taken since Cory Aquino opened peace overtures after the EDSA Revolt. Then and now, the duplicity of this government at feigning negotiations in order to gather intelligence information against its perceived enemies has reached scandalous heights,” he said.

Instead of respecting agreements such as the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law and the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG), the government is preoccupied in weakening all these, Ericre said, noting the alleged crackdown of those involved in the peace panel.

“Just weeks before, a similar, bare-faced attack on fellow NDF peace consultants Benito and Wilma Tiamzon was carried out in Cebu,” he said.

“This travesty justice and its own due processes, however, serves only as this government's own undoing. It only exposes the hopeless rottenness of the system this government represents and protects. It merely enflames the people's revolutionary anger and collective desire for holistic change,” he added.

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/05/18/14/ndf-leader-cries-foul-over-treatment-military